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Jono Bacon announces CC-licensed book project

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon has announced plans to write a book about …

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon has announced that he is writing a book about community building for tech publisher O'Reilly. The book will be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license so that members of the community can modify and redistribute the content.

Bacon says that the book, which is called Art of Community, will cover a wide range community-related topics, including governance, promotion, and conflict resolution. It will also provide real-world anecdotes to provide greater insight into the subject area. He aims to have the book on shelves this Summer and will also make it broadly available on the Internet. He plans to document the process and provide ongoing updates at a new web site that he created for the project.

"This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences," he wrote in a blog entry. "The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world."

This follows only a few months after the release of Denied by Reign, a solo metal album that he produced himself and distributed under a Creative Commons License. Bacon is also one of the coauthors of the Official Ubuntu Book.

His announcement has been met with enthusiasm by members of the open source software community, some of whom could appear in the book's anecdote-driven narrative. It seems like a unique and innovative way to approach the topic.